From Inventor to Gamedev

Seaside Baboon :

Munich, Germany, July 23rd, 2024

 

In 2023, Joachim Hofer, an industry expert in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), quit his career and started making games as an indie developer. On July 26, 2024, his first game, Goblin Auto Club Manager, will be released on Steam. It is an auto battler with race cars instead of fighting in a 90s retro look.
 

"It was a scary decision to leave a job with a fixed income that is all about facts and numbers to work independently in the entertainment industry - a field I know nothing about. But now I am sure that I will never regret it." Joachim Hofer, developer of Goblin Auto Club Manager.
 

Joachim worked for over 15 years at technology giants Siemens and Intel as well as smaller companies. He specialized in Automatic Speech Recognition, but also worked in other areas of Digital Signal Processing. At Siemens, he invented algorithms that analyze the vibrations of machines to determine their condition. At a small company called Müller BBM Active Sound Technology, he worked on active noise cancellation for luxury cars. This technology uses the car's speakers to play a sound that is the opposite of the engine's sound. The two sound waves cancel each other out, reducing the audible engine noise for passengers. Throughout his career, Joachim has authored several patents and made other inventions that were kept as trade secrets by their respective companies.


You can find his published inventions on Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Joachim+Hofer&assignee=Siemens,SVOX,Intel
 

Joachim has always lived frugally. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment. He has no car, no expensive hobbies, and spends most of his vacations on his balcony. When he lost his job in May 2023 due to the insolvency of the company he worked for, he had saved enough money to survive a few years without income. Joachim decided to use this opportunity to pursue his childhood dream of designing and creating computer games on his own.
 

"I think I have a talent for mathematics, but I don't find it particularly compelling. I love art, even though I'm not very good at it." Joachim Hofer, developer of Goblin Auto Club Manager.
 

Joachim's first game, Goblin Auto Club Manager, will be released for PC on Steam on July 26th. He designed the game mechanics and visuals himself and used music from one of his friends, Hermaniak. The game runs internally in a resolution of 320 by 180 pixels with a colorful palette. There are no modern lighting or transparency effects. This oldschool pixel art style makes the game resemble those from the early 90s.

The gameplay mechanics are more modern. The game is similar to an auto battler. Instead of setting up automatic battles, the game revolves around racing cars. Players can manage their racing teams, buy and improve car parts, customize cars for different tracks, and decide on racing strategies. The driving of the cars is automatically simulated by the game.
 

The unconventional background of its developer is also reflected in the way Goblin Auto Club Manager was created. Instead of using a game engine like Unity, Godot or Unreal, the game was written from scratch in C++. It uses only a few open source libraries, particularly Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL2). Nowadays it is not efficient to create games this way, game engines offer several tools to simplify and speed up the development. Joachim had tried both Unity and Godot. But because of his years of experience writing programs in C and C++, he felt more comfortable with this approach. Similarly, all the graphics were created in paint.net, which is purely a hobbyist tool.
 

The developer's education is also noticeable in the gameplay algorithms. The automatic steering of the cars is done by a modified Token Passing algorithm, similar to what is used in legacy ASR systems to find the most likely sentence hypothesis. This approach is well known in the ASR community, but probably few game developers have ever used it. In Goblin Auto Club Manager, the driving of the goblins is modeled by a directed graph of possible steering decisions. This way, the token-passing algorithm can be repurposed to solve the problem of self-driving race cars.

With Goblin Auto Club Manager being released just now, it remains to be seen whether players will like the results of the unconventional approach to game development.

Press kit: https://unthought.de/goblinautoclub/

For interviews or other exclusive content, please contact the developer directly:

Joachim Hofer, [email protected]

About Seaside Baboon:

Seaside Baboon is a solo indie game developer who quit his 9-to-5 job in 2023 and started making games out of his passion for fine arts and gaming.